Neither Remo nor Chiun was watching as a huge cloud of dirty yellow smoke belched high above the treetops behind them.
EPILOGUE
"Okay, that's it! That's it!" The supervisor was yelling at Nick Biel and Nick really didn't like it at all. His boss had been acting like a show-off ever since the bigshot had shown up earlier in the afternoon.
The entire area was charred black from the fires that had raged across the plains months before and Nick's backhoe was having a hard enough time getting in and out of the trenches that were the result of all the collapsed underground structures. The absolute last thing Nick needed was somebody screaming at him.
He got down out of the cab and walked around to where the supervisor and the mysterious bigshot stood. He Was again struck by something familiar about the man. But he felt that way a lot. Last week he swore he had seen Bruce Willis at the mall.
He dismissed the thought and, following his supervisor's shouted instructions, got down on his ample belly and reached down into the collapsed wreckage of one of the buildings. He pulled a charred piece of corrugated tin out of the way and found the object below it. Just where the stranger said it would be.
Nick was amazed that it could have survived all of the explosions intact and he was even more amazed that someone would want something so filthy.
347
The man had thanked Nick's supervisor, and after he left everything had returned to business as usual. Nick had gone back to clearing away the building debris so that the environmental clean-up crews could get into the deepest bunkers.
All day as he worked, Nick kept wondering why the mysterious man looked so familiar. It wasn't until he was home in bed that night that the answer finally came to him. His union had urged its members to vote for the man during one of the past presidential elections.
He wondered what Michael "Prince" Princippi would want with a dirty old crockpot filled with yellow powder.